Daughters of the Winter Queen

by Nancy Goldstone

  The security of her childhood expressed itself in her personality. “Louisa was lively and unaffected,” her youngest sister, Sophia, reported. She was “not so handsome” as the eldest, Princess Elizabeth, “but had, in my opinion,” Sophia continued, “a more amiable disposition.”

  But what really contributed to Louise Hollandine’s vitality and set her apart from the rest of the family was the joy she took in art. “She devoted herself to painting, and so strong was her talent for it that she could take likenesses without seeing the originals,” Sophia marveled. When immersed in front of a canvas, Louisa was apt to lose herself in concentration, an idiosyncrasy for which she was often teased by the rest of the household. “While painting others she neglected herself sadly,” Sophia remembered with amusement. “One would have said that her clothes had been thrown on her, and this caused [a visitor to the court] to compare her… to a painter who, failing to paint a horse’s foam, threw his brush at the picture in a rage, and by this chance succeeded to perfection.”

  Not only was Louisa blessed with obvious talent, but she also had the spectacular good fortune to have been born at exactly the right moment and in exactly the right place to take advantage of one of those rare seismic shifts in perception in the history of art: the emergence of the Dutch school of painting.

  A NUMBER OF FACTORS are said to have contributed to the flowering of Dutch art during the first half of the seventeenth century. The profits pouring into Holland from the East India Company and other shipping ventures are usually cited first, for it is true that wealth and art go hand in hand, the one to buy, the other to produce. Then, too, with the fighting centered in Germany and Belgium, Holland was for the most part able to avoid the ravages of war—the atrocities committed by occupying enemy soldiers, the famines and diseases that haunted the rest of Europe. This in turn allowed those of its citizens so inclined to concentrate on more peaceful artistic pursuits.

  But surely the defining impetus for the magic that gleamed softly from Dutch palettes was the exhilaration that came with finally squirming out from under the centuries-old strictures of the Catholic Church with its emphasis on the same repetitive biblical stories, and the ensuing opening up of subject matter. Protestant Holland had no soaring cathedrals whose oversize walls required decoration with images of penitent crowds surrounding John the Baptist’s head on a platter. Large paintings went instead to town halls, whose members clamored for more secular scenes of banquets and battles. And there was a whole new market—here’s where the wealth comes in—in smaller pictures, which were much in demand by the burgeoning upper middle class, whose taste ran to portraits (usually of themselves) and scenes of domestic life. These more intimate, interior paintings demanded a high degree of detail as well as a complex handling of light and dark.

  The king and queen of Bohemia arrived at The Hague just in time to get a firsthand look at the exciting new developments in art. They were a little too early for Rembrandt—in 1621 he was only sixteen and was apprenticing in his hometown of Leyden—but they, like everyone else in Holland, were very impressed by the work of a thirty-year-old master who had just returned from an extended period of study in Rome. His name was Gerrit van Honthorst.

  HONTHORST WAS BORN IN Utrecht, less than fifty miles east of The Hague, in 1592. He demonstrated an early talent for sketching and was apprenticed under a local painter. Wanting a wider artistic experience, by the age of twenty-four he had found his way to Italy. It was to be the making of him.

  Honthorst settled in Rome and was for the first time exposed to the genius of the Renaissance. He learned the difficult technique used to produce frescoes and studied the masterworks on the walls of St. Peter’s. He was particularly impressed with the paintings of Raphael, who employed multiple sources of light in a single canvas, and of Caravaggio, whose style he at first sought to emulate and later incorporated into his own approach. He stayed for several years, working for a prince and honing his skills by painting religious scenes. His twist was to portray a familiar story but set it at night, which altered the effect. He did this so often that his contemporaries called him “Gherardo delle Notti” (Gerrit of the Night).

  By 1622 he had returned to Utrecht, where he produced, among other works, The Dentist, which depicted a man having his tooth pulled by candlelight. The novelty of the subject matter, the intensity of the light on the faces of dentist and patient, the shadows on the small circle of men observing the operation with interest, and the darkness beyond all combined to recommend Honthorst to the public and his peers alike. He was elected dean of his local guild and came to the attention of Elizabeth, who was looking for an art instructor for her children. He quickly became her official court painter, specializing in portraits of the Winter King and Queen and their many children. He was also employed by the prince of Orange and his wife, and Elizabeth even sent him to England in 1628 to paint portraits of Charles I and Queen Henrietta Maria.*

  By 1629 Honthorst was back in Holland and engaged as instructor to those of Frederick and Elizabeth’s children who were old enough to take lessons, and Louisa was soon included in this group. To have such a teacher must have been a gift indeed. It’s no wonder that Louisa was passionate about her painting.

  But a royal princess could not, as Rembrandt did, perfect her talents by spending all of her time sketching in the streets or in her room at home painting her own face in the mirror. (“He never left off working in the house of his parents while daylight lasted,” a contemporary asserted.)† By 1635, Louisa was old enough to be moved out of the Leyden house and into the court at The Hague, where her mother and elder sister resided. She still took lessons from Honthorst and did as much painting as she could, but her days were bound by other obligations, such as helping to entertain the many visitors who flooded her mother’s court and participating in whatever amusements had been scheduled for the evening. And of course, her principal duty was to attract a suitor, preferably one who could help promote the family’s single, overriding interest: to have Karl Ludwig reinstated as elector, and secure the return of the Palatinate.

  WHEN IT BECAME CLEAR to the elector of Saxony that France and Sweden had come to an agreement to more or less divide up Germany between them (leaving him out), his enthusiasm for his former allies, never particularly strong to begin with, waned considerably. He might do better, he began to think, if he offered his services and allegiance to the emperor. At least it was worth talking about. So in the spring of 1635, he sent envoys to Ferdinand to open up a channel of negotiation.

  Ferdinand, to his credit, jumped at the chance to come to terms with one of his Protestant opponents. Fifteen years of watching the brutal impact of war on his formerly prosperous empire had sickened him. He’d seen beautiful, centuries-old cities and towns destroyed, and farmland ruined by battle. Thousands died every year in the fighting and thousands more from the disease and famine that were the inevitable by-products of the movement and quartering of large armies.

  The resulting treaty, ratified on June 15, 1635, and known as the Peace of Prague, was clearly intended to end the war for good. By its terms, the emperor volunteered (with one exception) to turn the clock back to 1620, before the start of hostilities. He offered full amnesty to all the Protestant Germans currently fighting against him, and agreed to allow them to practice their religion within their various territories without fear of imperial reprisal. No longer would Protestant churches or any of their other property be appropriated for Catholic use, nor would a Protestant area be put under the administration of a Catholic governor. But the emperor went even further in his concessions. By this contract, he formally committed himself to ensuring that an equal number of Protestants and Catholics served as judges on the high court and even accepted that this same religious quota would apply to the members of his own private council.

  The really unique aspect of this agreement was that this time, he meant it. The Catholic Ferdinand, once rigidly intolerant, no longer sought to eradicate his otherwise loyal
Protestant subjects or degrade their rights as citizens of the empire simply on the basis of their religious beliefs. In his revised and far more temperate approach to rule may be discerned the first precious seeds of the Enlightenment.

  The emperor’s one caveat was that the duke of Bavaria, who had remained loyal to him from the beginning, should retain the Upper Palatine and the title of elector, leaving only the Lower Palatine to the queen of Bohemia’s family, although he did offer to bestow a small monetary compensation on Elizabeth’s children, provided they came before him and humbled themselves properly.

  The publication of these peace terms caused a sensation. Protestant Germany, with no desire to give itself over to France and Sweden, looked to its own interests and overwhelmingly followed the elector of Saxony’s lead. By August of 1635 nearly every German member of the former anti-Habsburg alliance had taken advantage of Ferdinand’s offer of amnesty and defected to the emperor’s side. Nobody cared that the duke of Bavaria was going to keep the Upper Palatinate.

  Nobody except Elizabeth, who fought this new development with everything she had. She fired off letter after letter to Bishop Laud, whom she knew to be the man most likely to influence her brother Charles, denouncing the terms of the Peace of Prague and begging for English help against it. She lodged an official protest with the Protestant German barons who had formerly been her allies. She put pressure on the prince of Orange to add his own voice—and ambassadors—to hers to oppose the peace, characterizing it as a victory for Catholicism. She even had Karl Ludwig, who at nineteen had come of age and was at least nominally the head of the family, issue a public manifesto entitled “Charles Lodowicke, by the Grace of God, Count Palatine of the Rhine… and Prince Elector of the Sacred Empire,” and addressed to “his Imperial Majesty and to all Kings, Potentates, Electors, Princes and Estates within the Empire and Whole Christendom” (Elizabeth wasn’t taking any chances on leaving anybody out), in which he traced his claim to the Palatine to a bull issued in 1356 by the then Holy Roman emperor Charles IV, which stated that “hereafter, no dispute nor dissension arise between the sons of the said Electors, and Princes temporal, and that the public good and tranquility suffer no stop nor detriment. We, desirous to remove all such impediments, do by this present Act, never to be repealed, declare, will, and ordain, by our Imperial Authority; that when any of the said Electors shall decease, his Right, Vote, and power Elective shall descend to his eldest Son… without any opposition.”

  As a final, lasting illustration of her defiance of the Peace of Prague, in 1636 Elizabeth threw down the gauntlet in the most visceral way possible by commissioning Honthorst to paint a massive group portrait, fifteen feet long by ten feet wide, of every member of her immediate family (including the dead ones, who were portrayed in a corner window bathed in celestial light, looking down benevolently and sort of cheering on the live ones). Called The Triumph of the Winter Queen, it featured a larger-than-life Elizabeth riding over her crushed enemies in a Roman-style chariot harnessed to a set of lions (most likely representing England, a nice mix of symbolism and wishful thinking) and surrounded by her children.*

  Fourteen-year-old Louisa, posing for this picture (that’s her in salmon pink with a chaste veil over her head, standing behind the lions and holding the palm frond; her older sister, Princess Elizabeth, as the eldest daughter and leading nuptial candidate, holds a position of prominence in the foreground in blue), could not have helped but been aware of the political implications of the painting. By the summer of 1636, her two eldest brothers (pictured on horseback behind their mother, Karl Ludwig in kingly ermine, Rupert on his right dressed as a Roman soldier) were both away in England. The visit represented something of a milestone for the family. None of the queen of Bohemia’s children had been allowed to set foot in Britain while their grandfather was alive, but they had heard their mother’s stories of it and knew it to be a place of great wealth and ease. They were all naturally very curious about it (all those English lessons!), and it seems to have grown in their minds into a kingdom of fairy-tale dimensions. Elizabeth, fearing rejection, had not even bothered to ask her brother’s permission to send her sons but had used the occasion of Karl Ludwig’s coming of age to establish the precedent that he might, as a sovereign in his own right, travel freely on state business, and would naturally want his first official act to be to pay his respects to his uncle Charles.

  It was a gambit that paid off. Both boys were warmly received by the king and queen and became great favorites of the court. Karl Ludwig, conscious of the heavy responsibility he had inherited, was cautious and staid, but his manners and English were perfect, which helped a lot. He made a very persuasive advocate for his cause. Elizabeth had been right: Charles found it much more difficult to turn down an entreaty for money and soldiers when it was delivered in person by such an obviously respectable young nephew. And sixteen-year-old Rupert, all fire and energy (the family nickname for him was “Le Diable”—the devil), the polar opposite of Karl Ludwig, only added to his brother’s appeal. A superior sportsman, constantly in motion, quicksilver Rupert was irresistibly charismatic. Both Charles and Henrietta Maria found him enormously entertaining and encouraged his fearless, adventuresome nature—Charles even went so far as to consider sending Rupert off to conquer Madagascar until his mother, hearing of this wild scheme, put a stop to it. For their part, Karl Ludwig and Rupert, used to the genteel poverty of the household in The Hague, were dazzled by the magnificence of their uncle’s court and felt that England more than lived up to their childhood imaginings.

  Prince Rupert at twelve

  While they were away, Louisa and her two older siblings, Princess Elizabeth and fifteen-year-old Maurice (who always seems to have been left behind), had a visitor: her sixteen-year-old cousin Frederick William, eldest son of the elector of Brandenburg. A bright boy, Frederick William had been sent by his father to study at the University of Leyden with Maurice and Maurice’s two brothers, eleven-year-old Edward and nine-year-old Philip. (Gustavus Adolphus, the baby of the family, was still too young to attend school.)

  Frederick William evidently enjoyed this, his first visit to Holland, every bit as much as Karl Ludwig and Rupert relished their time in England. The Hague might not be as overpoweringly vast as London, nor his aunt’s court as grand as Charles I’s, but it was a pinnacle of commerce, culture, and sophistication as compared to Berlin. The trip made a big impression on him. He was fascinated by the ships and bustling streets; he found himself drawn to the art and intellectual life of the Dutch; he took pleasure in participating with his older cousins in their various amusements—riding and hunting at his aunt’s summer house in Rhenen, as well as the usual diversions of parties, concerts, and plays. But what really seems to have recommended The Hague to him and made his time there so delightful was his cousin Louisa. Teasing and talented, she was unlike any girl he had met. It soon became obvious that he was smitten with her.

  This was a very good match for Louisa. Frederick William stood to inherit his father’s lands and titles, and he was just the right age for a bridegroom. Even better, as a Calvinist, he passed the Winter Queen’s all-important Protestant test. And although there is no record of her response, Louisa seems to have reciprocated his affection—or, at least, she made no objection to a wedding. As for her mother, the queen of Bohemia welcomed the idea of a marriage alliance with her brother-in-law the elector of Brandenburg, especially as it would make it more difficult for him to side with the emperor against her.

  It is a measure of just how toxic a union with the queen of Bohemia and her family had become in the wake of the Peace of Prague that the instant the elector of Brandenburg was alerted to his son’s romantic inclinations, he had Frederick William recalled to Berlin. Young love being a potent impulse, Frederick William at first tried to rebel against his parent and remain in Holland, but he was at length compelled to obey. No sooner had he arrived back in Berlin than he mysteriously took ill at a dinner given by the minister who had
negotiated his father’s return to the imperial alliance, giving rise to widespread rumors that he had been poisoned to prevent his speaking out against the Peace of Prague and allying himself with the queen of Bohemia and her family. Certainly Elizabeth always believed this to be the case. Although Frederick William eventually recovered from this indisposition, and the allegations were never proved (they were never denied either), it does give a sense of the intensity of the debate in Germany over whether or not to adhere to the emperor at this pivotal moment.

  For although the elector of Brandenburg and the other Protestant barons had agreed to the terms of the Peace of Prague, that did not mean the war was over. There was still the little problem of the Swedes, who, having invested so many lives and so much time and money in Germany, were unwilling to accept peace terms unless they were bought off with a large parcel of land (preferably in northern Germany, close to Sweden, which meant the elector of Brandenburg’s territory, something he was obviously reluctant to relinquish, another reason he had gone over to the imperial side). And the Swedish troops were perfectly capable of holding their own with or without the presence of their former German allies, a point that was driven home on October 4, 1636, when they decimated a superior imperial force under the command of the elector of Saxony, leaving 8,000 of his men dead and thousands more prisoners, and taking all of his artillery. This victory was sufficiently impressive to cause several of the Protestant barons to change their minds about the Peace of Prague and re-ally with Sweden (although the elector of Brandenburg, who had the most to lose, was not among them).

  And then, early the next year, came the final blow to those who had hoped to see the seemingly interminable struggle end. On the morning of February 15, 1637, fifty-eight-year-old Ferdinand, who had never ruled a moment in peace and had in the end learned to yearn for it, died a broken man, and was immediately replaced as emperor by his firebrand son (named—what else?—Ferdinand; well, at least it’s consistent), thereby guaranteeing that the war would go on.